


a more honest world

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: broken chains [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, M/M, No Spoilers, Optimistic Ending, Past Abuse, about to be rendered spectacularly non-canon-compliant, not dependent on the prior fic in the series, weird and winding love confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: After the war, the Resistance tortures General Hux for information. Ben intervenes, but his rescue reopens old wounds.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: broken chains [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1573762
Comments: 6
Kudos: 98





	a more honest world

**Author's Note:**

> Set after an imaginary version of TROS that ends in Bendemption but probably not Reylo. Ben lives on, adored as a war hero. Hux is arrested and tortured for information by the Resistance.
> 
> [Mairans](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mairan) are gigantic, telepathic octopi, used by interrogators to detect lies.
> 
> This grew from the same general premise as [on resurrection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843571), but this is a different story.

Hux lies on the bed, wrapped in tubes and pumps and the white of his medbay gown. With narrow wrists and too-pale skin, he looks angelic, childlike, as if Hosnia and the First Order were merely a faraway bad dream.

Then he opens those eyes— grey like the _Finalizer,_ or like the rainclouds on the home planet Ben only knew from Hux’s own faint memories— and Ben inhales too quick.

 _How are you?_ That’s the established etiquette in circumstances like these. Ben opens his mouth and nearly lets the words escape.

“What do you remember?” he says instead.

Hux’s eyes dart about the room, taking in med-droids beeping in the periphery, the soft curves of Chandrilan architecture. They linger a hint too long on Ben as Hux reorients himself.

“Nothing accurate,” he says at first.

Ben frowns.

“I recall being eaten by a Rathtar, but given that I still possess four functioning non-mechanical limbs I assume that was a pathetic delusion.”

Ben swallows hard.

“Not entirely,” he says cautiously. “You went up against a Mairan.”

Mairans are lie detectors, monstrous cephalopods like Rathtars. They traded physical rows of teeth for psychological fangs, shredding their prey’s mind to pieces even as they squeezed their tentacles tight.

“Here I thought Mairans weren’t used after the Empire,” Hux murmurs, head lolling to one side on his pillow. “I must congratulate the New Republic for finally joining the war.”

Leaning against the medbay wall, Ben crosses his arms. “The war’s over.”

A ghost of a smirk creeps across Hux’s face. “War is the natural state of the galaxy. Peace is the anomaly.”

The smile disappears once again, leaving a pensive child’s look. Ben wonders if that's how Hux looked at five years old, when he got his first command.

“How are you?” Ben says, bracing to be chided for his idiocy.

“Who’s asking?” Hux says instead.

“...Me?”

“You and how many microphones?” Hux stares at the wall away from Ben, voice unnaturally controlled.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You forget we’ve done this dance before,” he continues. “I’d come in, the reasonable negotiator, to elicit whatever intelligence the Order needed without spilling a drop of blood. I never brought you into an interrogation until I had failed.”

“This isn’t an interrogation.”

“No, of course not,” he says with a sudden mad snort. “But I assume it occurred to the Republic eventually that I once had valuable intelligence, and that they now had you at their disposal. You. The Order’s finest torturer.”

Ben winces.

“That...what they were doing to you, Hux? _That_ was an interrogation. This isn’t. I broke into the prison ship and saved you.”

“We should switch roles. You’re dreadful as the good cop.”

“I’m not—”

Ben breaks off and breaks into Hux’s head. He tries to find a crack and insert the truth, insert the undeniable truth that he is _no threat to Hux_. One crack in one wall in the fortress Hux has built himself—

He reaches for a fortress and finds smoking rubble.

Hux looks at him apathetically— numbly— and Ben forgets how to speak.

“Perhaps you’re interrogating me for them,” Hux says, his act of mercy, “or perhaps you really have staged some manner of ill-advised rescue attempt for reasons I can’t possibly comprehend.”

 _Can’t you_ , Ben nearly asks.

“In the former case, it’s unfortunate they sent the Mairan in before you. It wiped out nearly all the details the Republic could possibly want. Efficiently rendered me useless again.”

“Useless” rattles about the rubble too long, echoed first by Hux’s father, then Snoke, then Kylo Ren.

“How much information did I spill first?” Hux replies, articulate, _casual._

Ben struggles for words. “Mairans suffocate their victims if they sense a liar. The tentacles—”

“I’m familiar with the mechanics of their telepathy. How much?”

“...Nothing.”

“You need to get the mask back. I don’t even need telepathy, you’re such a dreadful liar without it—”

“Nothing important.”

He grits his teeth, now turning to stare Ben down. “Precision, _please.”_

Ben pushes himself away from the wall with a sigh and squares his shoulders.

“You found a loophole. Everything you said was true, it was just...irrelevant.”

“So what, I ranked Imperial battles, from favorite to least—”

“You talked about m—” Ben just barely catches himself. “You talked about Kylo Ren.”

Hux’s lips go slack, and he falls back further into his pillow, his weight even more dead than before.

“How the mask was made,” Ben elaborate. “Those kriffing Chandrilan fruits I made you source for breakfast. You detailed the makes and models of twenty devices I broke on the _Finalizer,_ allegedly.”

He pauses, waiting for a protest of “allegedly,” but Hux is silent. His eyes threaten rain.

“I didn’t know you were paying such attention,” Ben finishes, reduced to mumbling.

 _How could you not have known_ , Hux might ask in a more honest world.

“You were right,” Hux instead comments. “Nothing important.”

“Hux—”

“You have your peacetime now. Your girl. Why didn’t you kill me already?”

“Why didn’t you kill _me?”_ Ben counters. “In Snoke’s throne room?”

“Because you stopped me.”

“That’s the lie I told myself, yes.”

Hux narrows his eyes. “Because I was a bloody fool, then. I hadn’t yet learned.”

“Learned _what?”_

“You want to know what I remember?” Hux pushes himself up, onto his elbows, and though his arms are wrapped with tubes and needles his eyes blaze cannonfire. “What I remember of the Republic’s revenge, which they so poorly disguised as an interrogation? I remember being smashed into walls. I remember being my mind being ground to dust. I remember suffocating, I remember them crushing my windpipe, I remember...nothing of interest. Nothing you hadn’t shown me before.”

He spits it out, at once challenge and lament. Ben cannot look away.

Hux’s tongue darts out to wet his lip, and his voice goes quiet. “I’ve learned.”

“I didn’t kill you because I owed you.”

“And you recognized it,” he jibes. “Progress.”

“I _did_ pull you out,” Ben insists. “I dragged you out and I gave the Republic hell. They're ashamed the interrogation ever happened, it violated so many of their laws.”

“How quaint," Hux sniffs.

“You’re set for an ordinary jail now.”

“Captivity is the constant. Freedom is a kriffing lie.”

Ben blinks, thrown off by the profanity— crude, yet soft and unshaped as drizzling rain. “If you cooperate in reunification efforts there’s a possibility of parole…”

“Don’t insult me.”

“They believe anyone is capable of redemption.”

“So I’ve heard, Ren.”

“‘Ben.’” Hux’s eyes flick up to his, as he dares to look straight at Ben for the first time all day. “It’s ‘Ben’ now.”

“Ben.” Nostrils flaring, he tests the word on his tongue. “Ben Solo, Prince of Alderaan. I wonder what the good citizens of Hosnia would have to say about that.”

It only stings a little how he says it, more contemplative than cutting.

“And what happens,” Hux asks, “the next time I disappear from Republic custody? The next time I fall asleep in a proper jail cell and wake up in the loving tentacles of a Mairan?”

“I’ll come back for you.”

“Why? Because you owe me?” He unsheathes his sarcasm, more deadly than his monomolecular blade: “Because you _believe_ in me?”

“Because where you’re concerned, I’m a fool too.”

Hux stops breathing.

“You’re a fool all the time,” he replies, but with only a little bite.

Ben recognizes that look now glinting on Hux's face. The shifting storm-grey of his eyes— the closest he can come to devotion. Ben catches himself before he falls in, but his own eyes have darted down to Hux’s lips, and Hux has the answer to the question he didn’t ask.

“So parole, then?” Ben says.

“The war continues,” he replies, wry and caustic, and Ben’s heart flares because that’s as close as Hux ever gets to hope. “You’re not rid of me yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for posting two fics at once; it's been a weird day.


End file.
